NATIVE SOIL

Travel to Maui is still way down after last year's devastating wildfires. The locals want you back-as long as you're willing to engage in a new way of doing things that puts the health of the island above all else

- John Wogan

Early one Saturday morning in April, I find myself beneath a dense tree canopy in Maui's Honōkowai Valley. The air is still. Sparrows and mynahs chirp cheerfully. A wild pig, one of thousands that roam the mountain ranges of the Hawaiian Islands, darts in front of me.

It's hard to believe that the crush of resorts along Ka'anapali Beach, on Maui's western shore, are just a few miles away.

I've come with Puanani Lindsey, a former Maui Police Department dispatch officer who in 2002 cofounded Maui Cultural Lands, a trust to preserve the island's cultural inheritance sites, with her late husband, Ed. The organization was a response to the huge swaths of land the couple were seeing get bought up for development, with ancient dwellings and religious grounds often destroyed in the process. Ed, who had hiked all of Maui's major valleys, found Honōkowai the richest of them all.

Tan and fit from a life spent largely outdoors, Lindsey now runs the trust with her son, Ekolu.

Every weekend she comes here with a group of volunteers, including travelers like me, to rid the area of invasive species and repopulate it with native flora like pōhinahina and Hawaiian ti leaf.

Today I help them pull Guinea grass and koa haole under the hot island sun.

Removing weeds and planting native flora within this more-than-300-acre patch of land may seem like an inconsequential act on an island that spans 727.2 square miles. But the efforts of Lindsey and her volunteers lie at the heart of Maui's ecological health. "Our goal is to open people's minds, make them more aware of their cultural surroundings, and to leave the land better than when they got here," she says.